


Autopilot

by superkawaiifreak



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: I Will Go Down With This Ship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-18 13:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21661216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superkawaiifreak/pseuds/superkawaiifreak
Summary: In the wake of Roxas's death, Axel meditates on the first year without him. AU.
Relationships: Akuroku, Axel & Roxas (Kingdom Hearts), Axel/Roxas (Kingdom Hearts)
Kudos: 4





	Autopilot

**Author's Note:**

> Grief is sharp, sword-like.

When we touched down in Twilight Town, it was cold and lovely and wintertime. I had been seated by the choir conductor, Demyx. He looked at me with cold blue eyes. Demyx laughed with a deep sonority from the back of his throat, and had guessed correctly that I had been drunk on the night I choked on tabbouleh. We slept well next to each other. I, with my air-blown neck pillow, and he, using only a rolled jacket, breathed in silence. 

_There is nothing spectacular in Johannesburg_ , Demyx said, _except for the young boys_. Demyx did say he that had only ever lived in Hollow Bastion –– I couldn’t imagine what that must be like, to have never left anyone behind.

Our entire choir took a shuttle from the airport to the concert hall with great ease, though the aggression with which the cityfolk drove bothered me. Our group of thirty-something privileged Bastion University singers rocked every community we visited. Understandably so, we were treated like aliens. In return, we treated them worse. To us, they were fine china: non-humans, brittle, bound to shatter at any moment. That is when the visions of you began.

Yet as the privileged will do, I could only think of the tickets from Twilight Town to Land of Dragons that I had not yet purchased. Further, I still hadn’t purchased tickets from Land of Dragons to Olympus for the wedding. Xion was getting married -- I know you'd have hated that. The end of June was quickly approaching, and my summer in Twilight Town would soon be over. I wished that someone would have told me that, during my twenties, I should expect to spend thousands of dollars for wedding travel on top of being poor and a graduate student. These weddings – weddings! – would be my demise. I have spent too much on airfare this year. I needed a sugar daddy, I swear to god.

Briefly, I wondered if I could find a way for my university to pay for my travel. Remember when you used to swing by my place on the weekends, Roxas? It was always so nice to see you, to feel you melt into me. And really, what business did Xion have getting married without you here to witness it? You'll forgive her, of course. You always do. You know, Roxas, while god is up for debate, I do know that I, for certain, do not believe in weddings or marriage or the conjoining of spirits. The spirit is always singular, alone, drifting about. It seeks anointment.

•••

Men and women come and go, discussing peak traffic times and the sex they will not have later. In autumnal briskness, men wear zip-ups. Women wear scarves and boots and leggings, lest we forget who-is-what beneath the layers of unsexed wool. They smile when they speak. Nothing about them is foreign – both to each other and the world. They are each other’s greatest fantasy, animated statues at last descending from their pedestals. I used to squeeze your hand under the table, but was it enough? 

The rest of us, the ones who can't do whatever they please whenever they please, imagine a different world entirely. We imagine genuine social integration and indulge thoughts of public hand-holding. In our cold house we escape the frost and cuddle without shirts and exhale with fiery breaths. We giggle in the privacy of our bedroom. We warm the other’s body with our mouth, our hands. We spend the holidays together and hint about the future, as if the other will be in it for much longer. I will soon tire of this. I text you until I fall asleep. You text me until it’s warm outside again.

... Or so I thought. You wouldn't let me go. You kept texting, kept calling. I returned every email, every message, every Instagram DM. I wanted you around as much as you wanted me around. I had never felt that with anyone before. (But was it enough?)

•••

There is a statue of Saint Jude, the Patron Saint of Lost Souls and Causes, in my grandmother’s backyard. Each summer, it is regularly baked by the hellish Agrabah sun. It presides over the house and gazes longingly at the Virgin Mary shrine across the grass. Adjacent to her there is a fig tree and a rosebush. When I eat the figs, I slowly tear them apart down the center, as if paying respect to Achilles and Patroclus. The insides of these figs are fuschia. Sometimes the insides are golden-brown, like Achilles’s heels. It breaks my heart to think of Hector impaling Patroclus, of Achilles’s insane rage and poignant grief on hearing of Patroclus’s preventable death. I wondered, then, if grief could freeze time.

My grandmother, Hope, tends to red and green chilis in her two-by-eight garden. Her mother used to also plant vegetables, though she did not take as much pleasure in the harvest as my grandmother does. Her English name is meant to inspire optimism, but my grandmother has never lived in the snow. If she had, she would have worn scarves and boots and tight leggings. She and her husband would have begun a life of lost causes under wool and cashmere rather than overalls and hats, which is how they chose to embark. They’d don sweaters and mittens while masking each missed opportunity (to know their psyche, to break out of the chains of heteronormativity) with the birth of a new child. I am sure that if they had traveled together, he would have taken her to Paris. She would have delighted in it – she would have taken great, great pleasure in it, I’m sure – and would have kissed him in front of the Eiffel Tower. He would have grabbed her entire face with one hand to press their lips closer together.

•••

I was born on March seventeenth, which is the cusp of Pisces and Aries. I do not believe in astrology, but I also regularly discuss the existence of god, so I am wary of naming any group foolish. I used to hate that I was divided between two signs. It made me feel all the more ambivalent, as if my soul itself couldn't choose what to be. But you adored it. You said I was fearless. A dreamer and a go-getter. I looked at you and, pen in my mouth, said, _Roxas, t_ o _divine meaning from obscure systems of thought is to congregate._ You snorted and said, _I love you, Axel._

It is a noble act, divination I mean. We want to know each other more deeply. (I trace lines down your arms, your stomach, as we fall into the sheets.) When I touch other people, but especially you, with my fingertips, I imagine a coastline: that I am the seafoam and they the sand, and I find myself wanting more of this separate-but-together quality. It may be true that our bodily membranes are coastlines. I think of the where the ocean meets the sky and I hold up my hand, attempting to cradle the horizon. Who calls this watery womb home? The fishermen who know it as the sea? The ones who understand her rage, her danger, her terrorizing beauty?

Birthdays remind me of the inevitability of separation because parties eventually end, and we must remove the public mask. For this reason, I am skeptical of birthday parties. The host, I am convinced, is never as happy as they appear. I will explain. Last year, I was afflicted by hemorrhoids on my birthday, yet I endured three days of celebration. Last year, my grief overtook my body and I knew neither myself nor the image in the mirror. I couldn't believe it -- that it had happened. But there I was, smiling dully on the tops of rooftop bars and throwing back small bloody mary flights. I kept seeing you, and only you, that night. It was my first birthday since I was twenty-one that you hadn't been around. (My wretched yet thoughtful friends knew nothing.)

•••

April is the cruellest month.

I did not know to use Turbo Tax until I was twenty-three. To my utter displeasure, I have lost over two-hundred-dollars to the IRS for submitting erroneous tax forms. It pisses me off that there is no ability to get back what was lost. I hate the educational system of Agrabah. They tax and tax and tax with the somewhat laudable goal of maintaining an infrastructure so beautiful that tourists will drop munny from their pockets like they're millionaires. Sometimes, some of them are. I'm certainly not, otherwise I'd pay someone to fill out my taxes. I'd lose even more money. And, Roxas, on top of this, I am also forced to read fertility rites and poetry of Easter while filling out this inane paperwork. I'm annotating, in the margins and between the lines, my thoughts on resurrection. If it were possible, would society collapse? What if we saved our genomes and booted them up in servers and transferred nucleotides to some readable code? Would our spirit be intact? I think society would collapse if our brain existed without the soul accompanying it. We already handle death so clumsily.

During tax season, the dead are born again.

April stirs the dull roots of memory. Last Easter, Roxas died in a hang gliding accident. He was with his childhood friends -- Hayner, Pence, Olette -- and they started at sunrise. He wore that checkered wristband and had his hair tied back. To those who did not know Roxas, he was referred to as Roxas Tripp. I show great hostility to those who call him by that name. He despised the Christian fantasy of such a name as _Roxas Tripp_ , and, like me, ran from his hometown at age eighteen. Used university as an excuse to get the fuck out. I met him at a cafe called Milano. I had accidentally bumped into his chair and spilled his coffee, so I bought him another one, and in that first conversation, told him I was studying theology in the PhD program and he told me that he was a third-year undergraduate studying mathematics. He told me he loved my long red hair, used to play with it in the mornings, the sunlight dappling the floor of my bedroom. 

_Roxas_ drowned on his birthday off the coast of Atlantica at the peninsula beside a cliff named Devil Slide.

Commercial airline captains default to autopilot, but hang gliders do not. They cannot. They are erroneous. They possess judgment. They leave us all behind, and we die little deaths each time we accidentally remember them, and then grief strikes our hearts and eyes as if it is the first time we’re experiencing their permanent absence. It’s been eight months and thirteen days since Roxas died. Every day is harder than the last. It's harder still, hearing about the slumping of our world into some technological dystopia. I want to yell back at the techie naysayers, want to tell them that _some things are better done by robots._

Say what you will about automation services, but let me say this: humans are not meant to do everything. They are certainly not meant to fill out tax forms. I am not sure if they are meant to fly.


End file.
